Evan A. Feigenbaum

Nonresident Senior Associate Asia Program

Feigenbaum’s work focuses principally on China and India, geopolitics in Asia, and the role of the United States in East, Central, and South Asia. His previous positions include deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia, deputy assistant secretary of state for Central Asia, and member of the secretary of state’s policy planning staff with principal responsibility for East Asia and the Pacific.

Education

PhD, AM, Political Science, Stanford University
AB, History, University of Michigan

Languages

Chinese; English; French

Contact Information

Resources

Evan A. Feigenbaum is a nonresident senior associate in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Based in Chicago, he is also the vice chairman of the Paulson Institute, an independent center, located at the University of Chicago, established by former Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson. Initially an academic with a PhD in Chinese politics, Feigenbaum’s career has spanned government service, think tanks, the private sector, and three major regions of Asia.

From 2001 to 2009, he served at the U.S. State Department as deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia (2007–2009), deputy assistant secretary of state for Central Asia (2006–2007), member of the policy planning staff with principal responsibility for East Asia and the Pacific (2001–2006), and an adviser on China to Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick, with whom he worked closely in the development of the U.S.-China senior dialogue.

During the intensive final phase of the U.S.-India civil nuclear initiative from July to October 2008, he co-chaired the coordinating team charged with moving the initiative through the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors and the Nuclear Suppliers Group and then to Congress, where it became the U.S.-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act. He negotiated agreements with the governments of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and also has extensive policy experience with North and South Korea and Japan. He received three individual and two group superior honor awards from the State Department.

Following government service, Feigenbaum was senior fellow for East, Central, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations as well as head of the Asia practice group and a director at Eurasia Group, a global political risk consulting firm. Before government service, he worked at Harvard University (1997–2001) as lecturer on government in the faculty of arts and sciences and as executive director of the Asia-Pacific Security Initiative and program chair of the Chinese Security Studies Program in the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He taught at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School (1994–1995) as lecturer of national security affairs and was a consultant on China to the RAND Corporation (1993–1994).

He is the author of three books and monographs, including The United States in the New Asia (CFR, 2009, co-author) and China’s Techno-Warriors: National Security and Strategic Competition from the Nuclear to the Information Age (Stanford University Press, 2003), which was selected by Foreign Affairs as a best book of 2003 on the Asia-Pacific, as well as numerous articles and essays.

Asian financial integration is becoming a lasting feature of the political and economic reality in Asia and will pose a growing challenge to U.S. leadership in the Pacific. Washington should not shy away from this competition.

To make the market “decisive,” the state must retreat. China’s leaders have declared war on powerful “vested interests” that oppose reforms, but the biggest vested interest in the Chinese economy is, in fact, the state itself

Two difficult strategic challenges will test East Asia’s diplomats in coming years: first, the collision between economic integration and security fragmentation, and, second, the dominance of form over function in the institutions that could help to mitigate this debilitating dynamic.

With tensions between the West and Russia running high over Ukraine, China and Japan still wrangling over the Diaoyu islands, and America and China fighting over the same old stuff, it’s easy to be cynical about APEC. But this year’s summit seemed to accomplish quite a lot.